"He stared into his coffee, thinking quietly. "But you've never been afraid of anything, have you?""I have, though," I said, surprised at my own emotion. "I've been terrified... I just haven't let it s..."
- Paula McLain
"Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up."
"Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually possessed, and it wanted my best, my whole self. I would have to work very hard to be any good at it at all, and be more than a little mad to be ..."
"They’d scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating."
"We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, an..."
"I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone."
"I had come alive here...this was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A plac..."
"He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins."
"There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city."
"Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight."